Julian Dean Diary
2008 Tour de France - Stage 6: The Hurt Bag Is In Sight...
Today was a bit of a non-event for me. Well, actually no stage is a non-event; there's always something to do and today my job was to help Christian as long as I could. With the last 2 climbs at 50km to go, proving too hard for me, I ended up in the grupetto.
Things are going to get hard from now on. The terrian is difficult. Not mountains but small climbs - the sort you have to hang on for as long as possible and suffer to stay in the race. When it's the mountains it's often easier as straight away the grupetto forms and those of us who can't climb know we're never going to hang on to the peloton so there's no point in trying to fight it. The best thing for us to do is to get together and help each other through it. Hence, the grupetto is born!
The next two days won't be like that though, it'll be every man for himself and it's going to hurt. Let's hope that I'm going to be able to survive so I can try and do better later in the race.
Julz
Team Garmin-Chipotle presented by H3O
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